The main news this week involves painting. Gable painting began on Tuesday and the results are looking terrific! Other activity saw the power company working on the Main Street/north side, burying cables. (This necessitated digging holes in the median.) More flowers are in bloom and I have a short clip of neighborhood cat Autumn Calico rolling around on the sidewalk. A quick medical update will round out the narrative. Onward!
Both Pam and I took a lot of photos of the painting work in progress. Here are a few work-in-progress shots and I will include finished results below.
Last week I had included a photo of the power company putting guards around the power line that leads to the house. This photo below shows why guards were a good idea. The painter is in a bucket between the house and power line.
Above is over the east porch. The west side was somewhat more open.
The north and south sides had trees to contend with but the crew managed to get positioned OK. (Two guys, Will and Troy, each with a boom lift, did the work.)
Here are a few photos of the finished work.
As you can see, the painters were able to fulfill Pam’s request to paint the east gable under the electrical wire. We are very pleased we won’t have to try to negotiate rental bucket lift equipment under that wire. The house is looking better than ever. Now we just need to repair remaining [mint green] broken siding sections, and finish the second floor red painting.
The Tower: One of the painters will do some photography of the tower to establish a scope of work. A wooden decorative “skirt,” about half-way up, could possibly be removed, depending on what is underneath it. Photos may confirm it was built over the cedar shakes which could stay in place while permitting the removal of the “skirt” with no ill effects.
The top “cap” of the tower is problematic. It looks to have quite a bit of rot – can it be painted? Does it need complete replacement? Replacement would be more than I can personally do. Whatever we decide, it may just be “lipstick on a pig.” Our resources are not endless.
Moving onto other topics…
One of the outside cats, mentioned before, is Autumn Calico. Here is a – shaky – 57 second video of her grooming and rolling around on the sidewalk.
As if having two lift trucks in the yard was not enough excitement, the power company, Alliant Energy, dug a couple holes in our Main Street median. Power lines are going underground and junction boxes need to be installed on small pedestals at a few points. The following photos show one hole (of two in our median) and the plastic pipes that will eventually house the power cables.
At least the workers backfilled the holes when they were done and did a good job raking and leveling the area. We will throw some grass seed down and see if we get some green to come back yet this summer.
Around the yard, hostas are beginning to bloom as are daylilies. Regular lilies and hollyhocks are continuing to show their colors so we have a pretty good show going right now.
Finally, a medical note. I went to the dentist for impressions that will result in a casting for my replacement front tooth. The new tooth should be ready for fitting in a couple weeks. I broke it last September and getting the implant has been a long process, now nearing an end.
The Civil War Reenactment we had planned to attend last weekend did get rained out, but we really needed the rain and did not mind staying inside to read and work on quiet projects. Elmo, Bru, and Blondie had a quiet afternoon napping in the laundry room. (JoJo was elsewhere in the house.)
That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!
Pam’s Penny
Oh, Heart House. Look under the roof overhang below and see wood that hasn’t seen paint in decades (the dirty looking bit at the bottom of the photo). No wonder the house has looked so bedraggled. When I question why we took on this exterior paint “experience” I’ll remember this photo.
The paint crew was very thorough when cleaning the wood trim in the gables prior to painting, wood trim I refer to as the “lace” of the gables. Spindles and decorative circles fell off the lace left and right during paint prep. One wonders how they stayed up under the eaves all these decades? In the end, the lace is still attractive without these”artifacts” but it’s less intricate than it was originally. (The only piece of lace with most of the spindles intact is in the south gable, an area protected by the giant oak trees.)
Happy Trails.